Electric arc welders include a wire feeder for feeding welding wire from a spool through a welding torch or gun to a welding operation. Such feeders normally include a DC motor for rotating the drive rolls by which the wire is pulled from the spool and forced into the welding operation. Wire feeders routinely have a high speed, low torque DC drive motor connected through a gear box that includes reduction gears to convert rotation of the motor to the proper rotation and torque at the drive rolls. The use of a DC motor with a gear reducer to rotate the drive rolls represents an economic and efficient package universally employed in the welding industry. However, sizing of the DC motor to be suitable for a wide range of welding applications is quite difficult. Large diameter electrodes are often fed at a low wire feed speed and require the wire feeder to generate a high torque to overcome friction in the driving operation. Small diameter wires are used for a wide range of welding operations. The maximum wire feed speed for a small diameter wire may be two or three times more than the maximum wire feed speed of a larger diameter wire. The friction involved in feeding small diameter wire to the welding operation is substantially less than the friction employed when feeding large diameter wires. To create a universal wire feeder that accommodates both large diameter wires and small diameter wires, welding equipment manufacturers normally provide a gear box having changeable gears to change the gear ratio between the motor and the drive rolls. In operation, changing from one size wire to another is not frequent. Consequently, the use of a changeable gear box between the motor and feed rolls has become standard in the welding industry. Designing wire feeders for changing gear box ratios incurs an extra cost in the product. More than one gear must be provided to the end user. They must be stored and retained. The replacement gear is often misplaced and must be purchased again as a separate aftermarket item. Furthermore, the DC motor is often mounted at a different position when the gear ratio is changed. Consequently, the overall product size must be larger to accept the different motor orientations for different gear ratios. Costs are incurred by the end user and/or the distributor who must experience down time changing from one gear ratio to another. This type of wire feeder often has different mounting arrangements for the motor when different gears are used in the gear box. All of these disadvantages of the existing wire feeders for an electric arc welder are overcome by the present invention.